I got a new gaming computer since the video card on my old one died and it was time to do a full upgrade. This turned out to be an effort spread across several weekends and four re-installations of Windows. It’s finally set up the way I want it. Here is a short build log.

Requirements

• The machine must be small. Mini-ITX or so.
• Good video card, but not necessarily the best.
• Freesync-compatible, since G-sync is more expensive and not based on open standards.
• SSD as systems storage. HDD for games and documents. In my last computer, I filled up the system SSD fairly quickly with programs I rarely used, so the newest (most played) games were on the secondary HDD. so I want to install everything to the HDD and use the Intel Smart Response Technology (iSRT) to cache on the SSD.
• Windows is installed on the SSD proper so it can write the pagefile and do “idle stuff” without touching the HDD.

Components

PCPartPicker part list

I still haven’t bought the DVD writer since Amazon UK refused to sell me one.

Fitting the hardware

The case is really small, light and seems to have good build quality. The side panel sheets are thin, but the case is meant to be transported often, so this makes sense. While the PSU is modular, I needed almost all cables installed anyway. The cables are annoyingly in the form of thick ribbons, and just the motherboard power supply cabling makes the interior look like a mess.

The video card is too thick to use the supplied upper clamp in the back position, so I had to skip that. It could have fitted in the front position, had Sapphire placed their PSU connector 5 mm forward.

The docking sled for the SSD is a nice, but fairly pointless touch. I will remove one of the sleds and place my 1 TB 3.5” HDD there instead.

Firmware setup

Since I have a 500 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD, I don’t want to waste the SSD on just using 64 GB of it for the iSRT cache (which is the maximum). This means I want to set up caching and then install the system on the remaining part of it. Unfortunately, the firmware setup doesn’t support setting up SSD caching. This must be done in Windows. Also, the SATA controller must be switched to RAID mode (but not yet).

I’m not doing any overclocking, but under M.I.T, PC Health Status I changed the CPU fan speed control to Silent.

I enabled Fast boot, and realized the hard way that Ultra-fast boot can render you unable to start the computer if it’s in SATA RAID mode: firmware doesn’t initialize either the USB or PS/2 keyboard in Ultra-fast mode. If Windows crashes, there is no way to control the Windows boot menu, and it boots into safe mode by default, which cannot read the disks, and thus there is no good way to get out of this. My solution when this happened was to remove all bootable disks, which causes firmware to go into setup instead, with enabled keyboard drivers. Why safe mode doesn’t load the SATA drivers properly is beyond me.

Since I dislike the old BIOS boot process, I disable all legacy support and rely exclusively on UEFI. This caused no issues.

Some other options:

• Enabled Intel Platform trust technology
• Enabled VT-d
• Disabled internal graphics
• Disabled the annoyingly bright yellow Audio LED
• Set Power on by keyboard to Any key
• Enabled all Platform power management options

For audio, I found out (again; the hard way) that enabling the DSP causes the Realtek drivers to fail to find the device.

Installing Windows 7

If I try to boot from my Windows 7 installation disc in RAID mode, it doesn’t find any hard drives. So, no go.

If I install in AHCI mode, I can’t easily switch to RAID mode. I tried this, and Windows keeps BSOD:ing on boot, even when following the how-to on overclock.net. It is possible this is because the device-to-driver mapping is not present, which this post tries to resolve.

What I ended up doing was installing Windows to the HDD using my installation disc in AHCI mode, then creating a bootable USB stick with the Intel SATA drivers added. This is straight-forward once you know how:

1. Get an ISO image of a Windows installation disc. I had a physical disc and used LC ISO Creator. A program that does one thing, and does it well.
2. Use Rufus to make a bootable USB stick from the ISO. Again, I used GPT since I dislike the old IBM PC cruft, but it shouldn’t matter. At first I tried to just copy the files from the DVD to the USB stick, but this for some reason didn’t seem to work (despite UEFI boot mode).

3. Use dism (which seems to come standard with Windows 7) to add drivers. The drivers come from the Gigabyte driver CD in F:. Add all drivers from the boot directory. My USB stick is D: here:

   md %TEMP%\wim
   
   dism /Mount-Image /ImageFile:D:\sources\boot.wim /Index:1 /MountDir:%TEMP%\wim
   dism /Image:%TEMP%\wim /Add-Driver /Driver:F:\boot /Recurse
   dism /Unmount-Image /MountDir:%TEMP%\wim /Commit
   
   dism /Mount-Image /ImageFile:D:\sources\boot.wim /Index:2 /MountDir:%TEMP%\wim
   dism /Image:%TEMP%\wim /Add-Driver /Driver:F:\boot /Recurse
   dism /Unmount-Image /MountDir:%TEMP%\wim /Commit
   
   dism /Mount-Image /ImageFile:D:\sources\install.wim /Index:2 /MountDir:%TEMP%\wim
   dism /Image:%TEMP%\wim /Add-Driver /Driver:F:\boot /Recurse
   dism /Unmount-Image /MountDir:%TEMP%\wim /Commit
   

   Note that you want to add it to all images in boot.wim, and at least to the image you are going to install in install.wim. In my case, running

   dism /Get-ImageInfo /ImageFile:D:\sources\boot.wim
   

   shows two images, hence the indices above. Doing the same for install.wim showed that my edition of Windows 7 had index 2.

4. Reboot and change the SATA controller to RAID mode.
5. Boot from the USB stick and install Windows.

Since firmware setup cannot set up SSD caching, I have an interesting problem. I need to set this up before installing, but I need to install before I can set it up. I did this the hard way, first installing Windows on the hard drive, installing all drivers and then enabled iSRT. Yes, this was installation number two. Then I did the entire installation again, this time installing to the SSD. However, the guide on using the SSD for OS installation at overclock.net is something I would try next time. Funnily enough, the firmware setup recognizes the drive as cache, but cannot create it.

So, all-in-all, I needed three installations of Windows to get the machine set up the way I wanted. One of them (the USB stick creation) could have been avoided if I had had another Windows computer available. (I actually installed it four times because I screwed up once.)

Once started, I read that changing C:\Users to point to the HDD is bad, so instead I just relocated my Documents and Downloaded directories to the HDD. I also set up Steam to use the HDD by default for installations.

Windows Update is stuck

I realized after all this that Windows update was stuck in searching for updates. This turned out to be a known issue and after installing the KB3102810 fix, it downloaded 239 updates and eventually gave me the option to upgrade to Windows 10.